Uncommon information (the cost of exchanging a quantum state)

Abstract

If two parties share an unknown quantum state, one can ask how much quantum communication is needed for party A to send her share to party B. Recently, it was found that the number of qubits which should be sent is given by the conditional entropy. This quantifies the notion of partial information, and it can even be negative. Here, we not only demand that A send her state to B, but additionally, B should send his state to A. Paradoxically, we find that requiring that the parties perform this additional task can lower the amount of quantum communication required. This primitive, which we call quantum state exchange, can be used to quantify the notion of uncommon information, since the two parties only need to send each other the parts of their state they don't hold in common. In the classical case, the concept of uncommon information follows trivially from the concept of partial information. We find that for quantum states, this is not so. We prove upper and lower bounds for the uncommon information and find optimal protocols for several classes of states.